Distributed event-triggered control for multi-agent formation stabilization and tracking

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed event-triggered control method for multi-agent systems to achieve formation stabilization and trajectory tracking, reducing communication load while maintaining stability under state perturbations.

Contribution

It introduces an event-triggered control strategy with state estimators for multi-agent formation control, addressing communication efficiency and robustness to perturbations.

Findings

Effective formation stabilization demonstrated in simulations

Reduced communication frequency through event-triggered updates

Robustness to additive state perturbations analyzed

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of formation control and tracking a of desired trajectory by an Euler-Lagrange multi-agent systems. It is inspired by recent results by Qingkai et al. and adopts an event-triggered control strategy to reduce the number of communications between agents. For that purpose, to evaluate its control input, each agent maintains estimators of the states of the other agents. Communication is triggered when the discrepancy between the actual state of an agent and the corresponding estimate reaches some threshold. The impact of additive state perturbations on the formation control is studied. A condition for the convergence of the multi-agent system to a stable formation is studied. Simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.